There has been a lot of recent chaos in the world of electric vehicles, and Ford has capitalized on it to build out its secretive low-cost EV team.
It also hired around 10 employees from Lucid Motors, and a handful from Apple’s recently disbanded EV team known as Project Titan.
The company declined to respond to specific questions about how it’s building out the team, which is known internally as Ford Advanced EV.
It also noted that some of the work being done by Ford Advanced EV could be applied to other efforts across the company, not necessarily just to the low-cost EV project.
“The Ford Advanced EV team is part of a global effort to build focused technology and product development teams local to the best talent centers.
That’s according to Jonathan Sanders, CEO and co-founder of fledgling Danish startup Light, which exits stealth Wednesday with $13 million in a seed round of funding led by European VC giant Atomico.
The Copenhagen-based startup is reimagining general ledger software from the ground up, replete with AI to cleanse transactional data, while also enabling finance teams to ask plain-English questions and receive straightforward answers from their data.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is king, packing support for CRM (customer relationship management), HR (human resources), project management, and perhaps the most crucial component of all, the general ledger.
And it’s this element of the ERP that Light is focused on dragging into the modern digital era, where AI increasingly rules the roost.
“Our mission is to be the first automated ledger for global companies,” Sanders told TechCrunch.
It’s against this backdrop that Evolution Equity Partners, a growth capital investment firm based in NYC, on Tuesday launched a $1.1 billion cybersecurity and AI fund, the third such fund in Evolution’s history.
The fund, called Evolution Technology Fund III, was oversubscribed, with participation from existing and new endowments, sovereign investors, insurance companies, foundations, fund of funds, family offices and angels.
“The Evolution Technology Fund III has already backed fifteen leading cybersecurity companies, initiating its investment period over 12 months ago,” Seewald said.
“We believe that provides private markets investors with diversified exposure to cybersecurity opportunities.”ESG will be another factor, according to Seewald.
Evolution’s 30-person teams manages around $2 billion in assets and has backed 60 companies to date; its previous fund was $400 million.
Today, four out of 10 Formula 1 teams use an evolution of that same technology.
However, where Formula 1 cars rely on 1,000-horsepower hybrid V6 engines, Baqué’s first practical application of the technology was human-powered.
At its core, NCS helps engineers avoid potential aerodynamic pitfalls while pushing them into directions they might not have considered.
NCS will then dig into its neural network to suggest improvements or modifications, possible paths in a 3D game of choose-your-own-adventure.
But like in most sports, success is cyclical for Formula 1 teams, and right now, Williams is very much in a rebuilding phase.
At the upcoming TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 event taking place in Boston on April 25, one session will stand out for early-stage companies seeking to navigate the turbulent waters of tech and staffing strategies.
Titled “How to Evolve Your Tech and Staff Strategies for Future Rounds,” the session will be led by Brad Stanton, the managing director of business development at Sand Technologies.
His session at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 will offer invaluable guidance for startups aiming to chart a course toward sustainable growth and success in an ever-changing landscape.
Then book your ticket to TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 right now before prices increase at the door.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024?
Data transformation and optimization — tasks that many, if not most, large enterprises deal with — aren’t easy.
The result was Coalesce, a San Francisco-based company building a suite of data transformation services, apps and tools.
“The data transformation layer has long been the largest bottleneck in analytics,” Petrossian, Coalesce’s CEO, told TechCrunch.
Coalesce’s response is a platform that standardizes data while automating the more repetitive, mundane data transformation processes.
That sort of vendor lock-in could be an anathema to expansion, especially given that Coalesce isn’t the only data transformation tool vendor in town.
Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its inception.
This funding round comes as a bit of a surprise as large rounds have been few and far between in France.
Before Pigment, Crespo worked for VC firm Index Ventures and Google.
We’ve developed a lot of modules that enable us to serve HR teams, supply chain teams and sales teams,” Crespo said.
Like many software companies, Pigment has also added AI features.
NASA has given three space companies the chance to design the next generation moon buggy — but only one design will go to space.
Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab are developing rugged vehicles intended for astronauts to drive around on the lunar surface, from which NASA may choose as early as next year.
The three teams will now enter into a 12-month “feasibility phase” that will culminate in a preliminary design review.
NASA declined to specify the dollar value of the awards, though Intuitive Machines said in a statement that it was awarded a $30 million contract.
“With NASA’s Artemis campaign, we are building up the capabilities needed to establish a longer-term exploration and presence of the moon,” he said.
To make all of this easier, Zip today announced Zip Premier, a set of new enterprise capabilities, as well as a new low-code integration platform that allows its users to build their own integrations to tap into services that Zip itself doesn’t support with its existing connectors.
And to make it easier to onboard new customers, Zip is also launching a set of 100 pre-built workflow templates today.
Zip is going up against several other procurement platforms from the likes of Coupa, SAP, Workday and more.
“Traditional procurement solutions don’t meet the complex needs of modern enterprises who face an intricate web of fractured procurement processes across many business teams and systems,” he said.
“Developed alongside our largest enterprise customers, our new capabilities streamline the entire spending process, delivering enterprise grade performance with consumer-grade flexibility so our customers can drive compliance and scale with speed.”
SiftHub’s AI assistant is built on open-source large language models (LLMs), and is supported by retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology, which uses additional data sources to fine-tune the quality of content generated by AI.
All that eventually brought her focus to sales and presales teams.
“Sales teams have a shadow team — a presales team or solutions engineers — and they are usually the unsung heroes of the organization.
Sales and presales teams lack the necessary tooling to handle this new selling environment.
We are excited to back the SiftHub team and be a part of their ambitious journey,” said Sanjay Nath, a partner at Blume Ventures.
